The SitePoint PHP blog has a recently posted tutorial showing you how to send event messages from PHP to a remote Logstash server running your PHP on a system with Windows installed. Logstash's goal is to centralize the logging in your environment, allowing you to input log information from a wide range of sources and stored in an Elasticsearch database.

By opening this article you’ve endeavored yourself to expanding your knowledge of PHP applications as part of event-based distributed systems. You’ll be given a quick intro into what we are referring to when we say event messages, what Logstash is, and why it is so cool.

If you’ve already heard of Beats or understand you can run Logstash locally to ship logs to another Logstash instance or directly to a datastore such as Elasticsearch, this article is still for you and will show you an easy-to-configure-and-run, hopefully more effective and certainly fun-to-use alternative.

They start with the quick introduction to Logstash and how the event handling they'll add in later will relay messages over to the waiting server. A code example is included showing how to manually write to rsyslog, pointing out that it and Logstash use a similar protocol to receive messages. The tutorial then shows how to view the messages in the log to ensure they're making it correctly and how to use this agent to stream messages over to the waiting server.

Each item in the list comes with a bit of detail around what the library is and what kinds of features it provides. There's also a few other links included to alternatives and resources about the libraries.

A while back the SitePoint PHP blog did a survey asking for reader feedback about the content they provide, what they thought was good/bad about it and what they'd like to see more of in the future. In this new post they share some of these results.

On the last day of 2015, we published a survey asking you, the readers, for an opinion about the PHP channel. It was a pretty open survey with mostly freeform answers allowed, so you could tell us literally anything. All in all, we collected 78 responses so far (the survey will remain open indefinitely, in case someone wants to give us more feedback).

On the average satisfaction scale, we scored 7.42 out of 10, and that’s without excluding the potential trolls who voted 1. That’s a very good result, but we’re determined to improve it further.

The rest of the post then gets into the results in detail, talking about:

overall satisfaction with the blog and its contents

opinions on the newsletter

author feedback

favorite types of posts

their presence on social media

They end the post with a summary of the things people wanted the most out of the site including more demos/practical examples and more PHP 7-related content. While these results are mostly applicable to the SitePoint PHP blog, they also can be applied a bit more widely across the community and on other sites that publish articles with technical content.

The SitePoint PHP blog has published the first edition of their "Sourcehunt" effort, sharing several PHP libraries to promote them and give them wider exposure to the community at large. In this post they talk about tools covering a wide range of functionality including cryptography, validation, user agent parsing and "humanizing" strings.

Last month, we introduced a new effort called Sourcehunt – a category of post intended to direct attention to less popular open source projects that show promise and need exposure. We’ve called for new submissions and accumulated an impressive list.

...and many more. A summary of the features, code and output examples are provided for most of the tools mentioned and the number of GitHub stars at the time of the posting is listed next to each library name.

Matthew asks Gary questions about his history with PHP and some of his own "highlights" when it comes to features of the language. They also talk about other languages, frameworks and is how preferred toolset.

In talking with Bruno, he asks similar questions but Bruno's answers deal more with the community around PHP than specific features. They also talk some about deployment testing and his own preferences on how his team works.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc has written up the first part of his look at installing Ghost with Nginx and Phalcon on his hosting provider. This is the first post in his "showdown" series of trials on various CMS systems.

You might be wondering why I’m writing about Ghost on a PHP oriented channel – this series will be a showdown of all the various PHP based CMS’ I can find, benchmarked against each other and against Ghost, as I look for the next best alternative. Since my DigitalOcean droplet already runs Nginx as a reverse proxy for the blog, I’ll also be deploying all the CMS’ on that same installation, each on its own subdomain.

In this recent post to the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc compares two technologies that have influence how PHP performs - the HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) and the Zend Engine in PHP6 - and the potential replacement of one with the other.

The fabled PHP 6 is long overdue. This unicorn of the web dev world has been “coming” for decades now, and it’s still not clear whether or not it’s actually something that’s going to happen in this decade, or just an idea, a fantasy of the PHP userbase. [...] In the latest edition [of the PHPClasses podcast] between Manuel Lemos and César Rodas, an interesting topic arose among others – Facebook’s HHVM replacing Zend Engine in PHP 6. While this was purely speculation on the part of the participants, and whether or not you believe in PHP 6, you have to admit it’s an interesting notion.

He starts with a look at the overall pros of the HHVM solution - the speed of execution, that it's backed by Facebook and its support for static typing. There's some cons that come with the HHVM though, including not allowing custom extensions, that it's developed by Facebook (yes, this can be a con too) and that there are other ways to enhance PHP's execution speed without sacrificing other functionality.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a post today announcing a new editor for the content of their site - Bruno Skvorc (replacing Timothy Boronczyk who helped build up PHPMaster.com from the start).

September 30th marked the stepping down of Timothy Boronczyk, Phpmaster's long time editor. He leaves behind a legacy of awesome: countless high quality articles, a fantastic and well formed writers pool, and a reputation one cannot easily catch up with.

[...] I realized PHP's true potential for rapid application development [after working on a Zend application], and branched out on my own. The following several years consisted entirely of experimentation, failures and endless StackOverflow trips. Finally, I applied to write an article for PHPMaster in July 2012. This was my first commercial article. I continued to write for Sitepoint and other platforms, but always strived to deliver my best work here – on the very site that gave me so many excellent tutorials which made me who I was. More than a year later, I was asked to step in for Tim as the new PHP editor, and I couldn't be more humbled and honored.

He lists out a few items on his "todo" list including improving the rebranding SitePoint's done away from PHPMaster.com back to the SitePoint site and the improved quality of upcoming articles. He also includes the ways you can get involved in the site - everything from just suggesting topics out to writing actual articles.

On SitePoint.com today they've posted the transcript of a "Talk with the Experts" session they did with Lorna Mitchell (instructor of their recent OOP sessions). The transcript includes questions and answers to those in attendance as well as some good links and advice.

Last Thursday I broke with tradition slightly and ran a Talk with the Experts session in the evening (down under), making it a bit more time-zone friendly for our UK audience. It also meant that I was able to swap my usual coffee for a wine, which probably made the session run a bit more smoothly. The subject was PHP and our expert was Lorna Mitchell, tutor of Object-oriented PHP and co-author of PHP Master: Write Cutting-edge Code.

The transcript starts with a collection of some of the links provided during the discussion and then runs through the entire conversation. There's some good advice in there, especially if you're relatively new to the world of PHP object-oriented programming.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article posted that has a review of PHPStorm, an IDE from JetBrains that focuses on providing a great experience for PHP developers and tons of features.

It's said the tool doesn't make the craft - a carpenter can drive a nail into a wooden plank using a hammer, a rock, another plank, or his forehead, but he'll rarely choose anything other than the hammer. [...] I'm talking about using a text editor versus using a full-fledged PHP-dedicated project-oriented IDE for PHP application development. Both will get the job done, but productivity-wise, one is obviously a better choice than the other.

Bruno Skvorc goes through a brief summary of what the editor is about and talks about some of the more notable features including:

Being built on Java (good and bad)

The IDE being strictly project-oriented

Supports the latest PHP version, including 5.4

Smart refactoring

Good intellisense support

He also mentions the plugin architecture that's included with the product and a few of the more handy plugins available. They're also running a giveaway in collaboration with the PHPStorm folks and are giving out IDE licenses and copies of SitePoint's "PHPMaster: Create Cutting Edge Code" book (rules are included in the article).